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The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation

Johndan Johnson-EilolaClarkson University

Do we think we know what writing is?

James E. Porter

Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing, p. 9

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Almost without our realizing it, writing is changing. Over the last

few decades, the fields of literature and rhetoric and

composition have more or less agreed that authors are not

omnipotent (except as literary devices). We are comfortable

with unreliable narrative. We speak of texts as intertextual

networks of citation, reference, and theft. We observe how

different readers make different meanings from identical texts.

We understand reading and writing subjects as ongoing,

contingent constructions, never completely stable or whole. In

short, we’re at ease with postmodernism.

More or less.

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For although we live in a time of contradictions and

contingency, we often fail to recognize these features in the

worlds we live in day to day, in our classrooms and offices. We

tend, despite all of our sophisticated theorizing, to teach writing

much as we have long taught it: the creative production of

original words in linear streams that some reader receives and

understands.

In the series (or network) of pieces that follow, I’ll attempt to

frame some different ways of understanding textuality and

literacy, exploring (and embracing) some of the contradictions

and contingencies that we often gloss over or treat as isolated

special cases. I need to make clear at the outset that I’m not

after a completely dispersed subjectivity, an utterly fragmented

landscape, or the destruction of our current methods of teaching

writing (after all, I still use first-person pronoun). Instead, I’m

interested in a rough deconstruction of writing practices--not a

breakdown or simple opening up (as the term seems to be

commonly used today) but an activity of exploring contradictions

as necessary conditions of existence.

Redefining Composition: Database and Essay

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I want to start with a brief background, because much of what

I’ll say later isn’t anything new—in one sense, it seemed like all

these issues were solved. But I want to start with the

background so I can identify the need to reiterate and rethink

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our situation.

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distort (stretch)]

The key issue here is addressing the question, Where does

writing come from? Contemporary ideas in our field indicate

that writing is not a solely (or even largely) individual act, but a

social one; new ideas and texts do not spring from the brow of

isolated writers, but are developed intertextually from bits and

pieces already out there. “Not infrequently, and perhaps ever

and always,” Jim Porter once wrote, “texts refer to other texts

and in fact rely on them for their meaning. All texts are

interdependent: We understand a text only as far as we

understand its ancestors” (“Intertextuality” p. 34). But this

interdependence of texts is not without its own rifts, ruptures,

and politics. In a bizarre way, the very interconnected nature of

texts holds them apart.

To open that issue, I want to propose two tentative methods for

understanding textuality in our postmodern culture, symbolic-

analytic work and articulation theory. Neither of these methods

seems all that revolutionary on its own, since each has been

used to analyze work and culture for a decade or more. But I’m

going to twist them slightly, asking how they might be used to

describe writing practices in concrete rather than abstract ways.

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Method 1: Writing as Symbolic-Analytic Work

I’d like to conclude with two brief gestures. First, if we are to

going to value these new forms of writing, we need to start to

examine our curricular goals. Because, as I said, these sorts of

writing are often more directly related to the work students do

outside the class, labor theory can help us understand and

contextualize learning. We need to begin thinking about new

forms of work, such as labor theorist Robert Reich’s category of

“symbolic-analytical work”.

[R]eality must be simplified so that it can be understood

and manipulated in new ways. The symbolic analyst wields

equations, formulae, analogies, models, constructs

categories and metaphors in order to create possibilities

for reinterpreting, and then rearranging, the chaos of data

that are already swirling around us.

Robert B. Reich

The Work of Nations

A former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Reich analyzes labor

statistics and trends in order to project changes in the types of

jobs emerging in the knowledge economy. As intellectual work

begins to replace industrial work in our economy, Reich

identifies a new job classification, one in which people

manipulate information, sorting, filtering, synthesizing, and

rearranging chunks of data in response to particular

assignments or problems. This job classification includes

members from knowledge work fields including architecture,

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system administration, and research science.

The focus of symbolic-analytic work on the manipulation of

information suggests connections to a new form of writing or a

new way of conceiving of writing in response to the breakdown

of textuality. Obviously, most symbolic-analytic workers engage

in relatively traditional writing tasks--they write reports, they take

notes, they make presentations. But the key focal point of their

work likes not in simply having good traditional communication

skills. Instead, symbolic-analytic workers are valued for their

ability to understand both users and technologies, bringing

together multiple, fragmented contexts in an attempt to broker

solutions.

By Reich’s definition, this new form of work involves skills such

as selection, arrangement, abstraction, and teamwork—skills

that are at the same time typical of what we want to teach in our

classes and what skilled programmers and database analysts

possess. Although the larger context of Reich’s analysis may

hide some disconcerting problems (symbolic-analytic workers

are rising in cultural status at the expense of traditional service

work jobs, which are increasingly dis-empowered and

downgraded) his analysis of the rise of symbolic-analytic work

in the US suggests both cultural and educational goals, not to

mention political and economic ones, for composition

classrooms. The production of “original” text will continue to be

an important activity, but the cultural and economic power of

that activity are on the wane. In other words, basic traditional

communication skills will continue to be a fundamental

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functional literacy, but we will increasingly need to teach forms

of symbolic-analytic work.

In many of our classes we already teach things that are typical

of symbolic-analytic work, but so far we’ve avoided connecting

that education up very well to labor theory in ways that will give

us a better structure to what we do (and, not incidentally, allow

us to justify our new methods/goals of teaching to the public).

Method 2: Writing as Articulation

Articulation is simultaneously a very complicated and very

simple concept. The theory comes out of Stuart Hall’s work in

the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies; Hall’s attempts to

work across an Althusserrian model of ideology and a

Foucauldian model which, in turn, Hall finds in Ernesto Laclau’s

work.

An articulation is ... the form of the connection that can

make a unity of two different elements, under certain

conditions. It is a linkage that is not necessary, determined,

and essential for all time.

Stuart Hall

Articulation involves the idea that ideology functions like a

language, being constructed contingently across groups of

people over time and from context to context. Like language,

objects—concrete objects like texts or motor scooters or

conceptual things like the words—objects “mean” not because

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they inherently, automatically mean something, but because of

what other objects they’re connected to. And, like language—

often, as language—people can attempt to forge new

connections in certain situations; they can connect objects

together to in various ways to shift the meanings. Importantly, in

most cases it involves groups of people and is a struggle

against other meanings and other groups. To use one of Hall’s

examples, consider the way that the Black Power movement

appropriated the term “Black” in the late 1960s, through a broad

and diverse campaign to construct new social meanings.

Another example of an articulation would be the way that the

concept of “database” has been constructed, over time and

socially, to mean something very different from “essay.” Those

definitions and categories are in no way given to us, but they

are also not meaningless. They are contingent but real.

The focus on active construction leads to As cultural theorist

Larry Grossberg puts it, with articulation “Meaning is not the text

itself, but is the active product of the text’s social articulation, of

the web of connotations and codes into which it is inserted.”

Importantly, articulation attempts to move beyond the relatively

modernist sender > transmission > receiver model of

communication and toward a “theory of contexts.” (Grossberg

1993, p. 4 qtd. in Slack p. 112). Articulation provides a model

for a postmodern practice because it situates itself with a

postmodern context and accepts postmodernism (breakdown,

fragmentation) as a cultural situation. At the same time, though,

articulation attempts to move beyond postmodernism, not by

negating postmodernism or rejecting it but by building culture

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out of what’s left over. As Hall once put it, “[H]ow long can you

live at the end of the world, how much bang can you get out of

the big bang?” (“On Postmodernism and articulation,” p. 131).

Articulation theory provides a way for thinking about how

meaning is constructed contingently, from pieces of other

meanings and social forces that tend to prioritize one meaning

over another. Because articulation explicitly rejects static and

isolated meanings, this perspective can be useful in helping us

understanding writing as a process of arrangement and

connection rather than simply one of isolated creative utterence.

* * *

As I said earlier, neither symbolic-analytic work nor articulation

theory are exactly state of the art. To some extent, they are not

really all that controversial: people make meanings by

rearranging other things, by negotiating multiple social forces.

We see this happening all the time: Politicians spin events

slightly by rearticulating them; students and researchers alike

navigate information spaces and construct arguments from

various bits of previously dispersed research. But our

recognition often applies abstractly to linear narratives and

texts. What happens when our culture takes those methods to

the next level. What conditions enable the emergence of a new

form of textuality, one that founds itself on fragments and

circulation rather than authorial voice? And would writing

teachers recognize it if they saw it?

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So to answer the question of why writing as symbolic-analytic

work and why writing as articulation, I need to detour into

intellectual property law briefly. We’ve been discussing

postmodernism, post-structuralism, the death of the author, and

related matters for decades. Although those discussions have

occasionally prompted or encouraged new forms of writing such

as hypertext, very little has changed in terms of what and how

we teach writing. Today, we’re finding that Intellectual Property

(IP) law has called our bluff: the author’s rights have been

signed over to transnational corporations; the sacred works has

been dismantled, fragmented, and dispersed into a capitalist

network of circulation; the whole world is now read and written

as a text, pages torn out, rearranged, and pasted into other

books in an endless cycle.

Composition teachers have become increasingly concerned

about intellectual property. When I co-chaired the CCCC IP

Caucus for several years, one of our key objectives was to

inform people about the rapid withering of things like Fair Use

provisions, which increasingly mean that, as teachers, we must

pay royalties for things like articles in coursepacks for single

courses. (See <http://fairuse.stanford.edu/> for extensive

resources on Fair Use.) In our discussions of fair use in the

CCCC Intellectual Property Caucus, there was always a general

sense that we were the champions of the masses, battling

against mega-corporations greedily extracting profit (and I think

this characterization is often true).

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At the same time, though, I’ve started to notice an odd

contradiction: in contemporary composition, although we’ve, to

some extent, moved past arguments about “authentic voice”

and the lone author struggling to produce text in their garret, our

ideas about what constitutes “creativity” and “authorship” are

still very much trapped in that era. IP law, however, increasingly

embraces a postmodern perspective on text.

Postmodern Authorship

In their College English article of several years ago, Martha

Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi argue a point that I think is

indicative of our current understanding of what “counts” as

writing.

After the divergence of literary and legal theory it was

possible to overlook the substantial contribution of

Romantic aesthetics to our law of texts, with the result that

while legal theory participated in the construction of the

modern ‘author’, it has yet to be affected by the

structuralist and poststructuralist critique of authorship that

we have been witnessing in literary and composition

studies for decades now.

Woodmansee and Jaszi,

“The Law of Texts,” p. 771

According to Woodmansee and Jaszi—and many others—the

whole idea of intellectual property is based on a Romantic

notion that ideas spring full-blown from the imagination of single

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individuals. In our postmodernist or social constructionist

cultures, though, we in rhet/comp understand ideas as forming

in contexts, in social situations. It’s difficult or even impossible

to find completely original ideas. So, the argument goes, what

right should any single person have over an idea?

Which is all well and good—I agree with this, but only to a point.

That point is the deconstructive hinge around which this chapter

revolves. For at the same time as Woodmansee and Jaszi (and

all the rest of us) claim that the author is dead, we ignore the

fact that contemporary IP law is catching up to postmodernism.

And here’s the hinge: in the same article, Woodmansee and

Jaszi (and all the rest of us) bemoan the decline of Fair Use

rights that educators have long relied on in order to allow us to

copy work for free, to use photocopied essays in our

coursepacks without paying reprinting fees to “original” authors.

But, as I’ll demonstrate in a moment, the decline of fair use

rights is firmly linked to a postmodern turn in intellectual

property law.

For the rise of postmodernism in general is tied to the loss of

original context noted in fields as diverse as labor theory,

management, literary theory, architecture, and film. From the IP

perspective, as I discuss in more detail in another section,

textual content has become commodified, put into motion in the

capitalist system, forced to earn its keep by moving incessantly.

Indeed, in order to facilitate movement, texts are increasingly

fragmented and broken apart so that they will fit into the

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increasingly small micro-channels of capitalist circulation.

Publishers, for example, now routinely collect permission fees

for chapters photocopied for academic coursepacks, a practice

unheard of twenty years ago.

Several years ago, I called the permissions department of a

major academic publisher to find out the fees required to reprint

a four-hundred word extract from a work in their catalogue. The

fees vary, obviously, from publisher to publisher as well as the

nature of the quoted work, among other things. Most publishers

also only require permissions when quotations exceed a certain

(but variable) length, usually several hundred words. When I

inquired about the general guidelines as to length, the

publisher’s representative said, “You need to seek permission

to quote even a single word from one of our texts.” I thought he

was joking (in fact, I laughed out loud), but I soon realized he

was serious. I asked for clarification several times, and he

would only repeat the single sentence over and over.

While the enforceablity of such a policy is, at best, questionable,

the spirit of the policy is increasingly common. Twenty years

ago, short selections from longer texts were invisible to the

capitalist network of large objects. But in a postmodern

economy, objects are actually easier to deal with when they are

fragmented into smaller bits, allowing them to be sold as

commodities, reassembled and repurposed into new forms over

and over again. In one sense, the explosion of “meaning” from a

single, monolithic, textual object into a network of intertextual

reference didn’t (as we earlier thought) create a liberating and

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communal web of shared experiences. Although we don’t

realize it yet, that explosion was the start of a supernova, of

breakdown and incessant movement and recombination, each

slippage and recombination now generating surplus value to be

captured as profit.

Text as Intellectual Property

In the sections that follow, I’m going to provide a very quick and

loose sketch of several important intellectual property issues. I

am not interested here in providing a definitive overview of

everything to do with IP law or even a coherent picture of how

IP law applies to rhetoric and composition. Instead, my goal is

to use recent developments in IP law to suggest shifts in how

our culture thinks about text and communication. Following this

brief set of analyses, I’ll attempt to play this breakdown in IP

through the lenses of articulation theory and symbolic-analytic

work to describe some emerging forms of writing. These new

forms of writing are interesting because they take the generally

debilitating trends of IP law (the fragmentation of content, the

commoditization of text, the loss of context) and make

something useful. In a recuperative move, the new forms of

writing use fragmentation, loss of context, and circulation as

methods for creating new structures.

Few would argue with the proposition that contemporary culture

often places a low value on traditional composition skills such

as elegant writing, carefully and complex argumentation,

sustained attention span on the part of committed readers

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immersed in a mediasphere dominated by sound bites and

flashing lights. Both cultural conservatives and leftist academics

agree in principle on this if not on particulars. Rather than

lamenting this shift, however, I want to trace a just-emerging

sense of text that can, with careful rethinking, occupy an

important place in our classrooms.

In understanding what counts as writing, it’s useful to look at

the legal aspects, particularly those related to intellectual

property. IP is near and dear to many of us because we

simultaneously own intellectual property—our textbooks,

essays, syllabi, websites, etc.—and we also use intellectual

property in our use of coursepacks, websites, and student texts.

reprinting essays for our coursepacks and on web pages. As

many of us have found, recently, the legal issues are pretty

complicated. Increasingly, we feel pressured by corporate

interests that seem intent on increasing the amount of

information we must pay for.

The bulk of this chapter deals with the separation we — I mean

“we” as rhet/comp academics, but also, in this particular case,

“we” as the general public — the separation that we have

constructed between “writing” and “compilation”. In questioning

this division, I’m trying to get at an understanding of writing

more properly suited to the role writing plays in our culture.

I’ll begin by describing the case of HyperLaw v. West Law, a

legal debate over what counts as “originality” in copyrighted

texts. This case, I should note at the outset, does not turn

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traditional understandings of creativity on their head. Indeed,

the eventual rulings end up being extremely conservative on

that point. But the case itself lays the groundwork for a later

series of challenges and rulings that do dramatically affect

simple, traditional notions like “creativity” and “writing”.

WestLaw v. Hyperlaw introduces some important issues,

following which we’ll move to a discussion of U.S. House

Resolution 3531, often referred to as the Database Anti-Piracy

Act (itself part of the broader World Intellectual Property Office’s

work to standardize an industrial and post-industrial model of

intellectual property on a global scale). Finally in the intellectual

property section of this chapter, I’ll briefly note several

arguments about the legal and ethical status of linking among

websites, particularly the case of “deep” linking, a term

describing links made from one person’s site to a particular

node deep within another person’s site. The legal statutes and

cases I cover here are one particular, historical slice of an

ongoing postmodern shift. The specific bills passed or defeated

do not, in general, seem likely to have radically changed the

general trend I’m analyzing, the breakdown of “text” as a

coherent and privileged object (a trend that we’ve long talked

about from a literary and psychological perspective but rarely

from an economic one).

These three sections, as I said, do not exhaust or even scratch

the surface of how intellectual property relates to rhetoric and

composition. Rather, they suggest the shape of a trajectory that

we must follow and respond to in order to work productively with

our students in contemporary cultures.

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HyperLaw v. West Law

Interpreting legal decisions is extremely complicated and, it

should go without saying, I Am Not a Lawyer. My purpose here

is not to dispense legal advice, but to note some cultural trends

that impact what it means to write. In order to make some of

those trajectories clearer, I want to know briefly examine a case

that, on the surface, seems to contradict the enforcement of

copyright.

I’d like to examine one particular case, Westlaw v. HyperLaw,

that surfaces some important issues pertaining to our

discussion about what counts as writing, about what we are

willing to value. In particular, this case demonstrates

developments in the legal status of “originality”. For

contemporary capitalism, originality typically involves the

production of novel texts (no pun intended). We do not typically

encourage our students to compose texts simply from

fragments of other texts. Even in research papers, we require

our students (and ourselves) to produce “new” (original) text

that summarizes and paraphrases other texts even as it quotes

them--to simply quote texts wouldn’t be “writing”. West Law v.

Hyperlaw challenges our notions of what counts for creativity

and, in turn, what creativity counts for in the marketplace. In one

way of considering West Law v. Hyperlaw marks a trend toward

postmodern fragmentation and a fetishization of the traditional

rhetorical arts of arrangement (nearly to the exclusion of all

else).

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Several years ago, a small company called HyperLaw filed a

lawsuit against the world’s largest legal publisher, West Law.

HyperLaw was attempting to gain permission to copy materials

from West Law’s books containing Supreme Court rulings.

HyperLaw freely admitted that they planned to copy their text

directly from West Laws, but argued that because the bulk of

the text—the legal judgments—were public domain, the copying

was legal. West Law argued that the changes they made to the

texts were protected, even if the source documents were not. In

publishing those documents, West added sometimes edited the

original text or added citations to other legal documents.

Because West’s publications are the industry standard

reference, HyperLaw also intended to indicate page breaks

from the West texts, so that users of the HyperLaw publications

could refer to the more common West Law pagination.

In judgment, Cardamode and Jacobs, the appeals court judges,

firmly delineate the requirement for creativity in terms of

copyright protection.

It is true that neither novelty nor invention is requisite for

copyright protection, but minimal creativity is required....

[C]reativity in the task of creating a useful case report can

only proceed in a narrow groove. Doubtless, that is

because for West or any other editor of judicial opinions for

legal research, faithfulness to the public-domain original is

the dominant editorial value, so that the creative is the

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enemy of the true.

Cardamode and Jacobs,

U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals

Notably, Cardamode and Jacobs separate “creativity” from

“truth”—the more factual something is, the less creative it is. I

would suggest that the assenting judges here held what’s a

common view of creativity and writing: mere reportage and

selection are not frequently original and should not be

protected; what is creative is the production of unique text--a

conception that still grounds most writing pedagogy and

practice in rhetoric and composition.

On first glance, the West Law v. HyperLaw ruling seems to

uphold our common ideas about what counts as creativity. As

Judges Carmode and Jacobs point out, we traditionally require

an intentionality going beyond arbitrary pagination. In a real

sense, they argue for a notion of creativity that is valued

precisely because it is not real. Creativity in the traditional

sense lies in the ability of an author or inventor to produce

something that did not exist before in the world.

I am interested in this case, though, not because of its outcome

but because it signals the start of a trend away from valuing

creativity in intellectual property and one valuing fragmentation

and arrangement. As West Law v. HyperLaw makes clear, the

business of information is both lucrative and competitive. The

weight of this market has begun to slowly shift legal opinion.

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Taken as a whole, this body of legal developments has begun

to change how our culture thinks about texts, about creativity.

But given our current understandings of language as a closed

system—is there any text that’s “truly” creative? In an odd way,

we might compare the “arbitrary” pagination in West Law’s

books to the arbitrary nature of language, where the “meaning”

of words isn’t set in stone as it were, but also very much

arbitrary. In fact, just as West’s pagination system became,

socially, the standard way of referring to cases, the ongoing

social construction of language is what keeps it going—arbitrary

doesn’t mean without value. Saussure showed us how

language functions in society precisely because it’s arbitrary:

because it’s impossible to trace a definitive link from any object

to the word describing it, people within cultures must agree,

usually implicitly, on the meanings of terms. To some extent,

this looks like a magic trick: If we can never really make a firm,

stable connection between a word and its object, why does

language work at all?

The meaning of any particular term grows out of, among other

things, how that particular term relates to other terms within that

culture’s language. For example, the term “dog” is linked to a

community’s general concept of what a dog is. Sometimes this

is traced formally, as in contemporary biological classification

into type specimens; more often, it’s a process of formal and

informal education that teaches children and others to connect

the word “dog” up to examples of dogs. Importantly, “dog”

retains its general cultural meaning by opposing “dog” to other

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similar but different terms such as “cat” or “wolf.” (But consider

debates over wolf/dog hybrids, which often cannot be placed

definitively in one category or the other—the line between the

two is not as impermeable as we would like to think.) As Hall

points out, the admonition that no meaning is guaranteed

doesn’t mean that no meanings are possible. So while a

number of postmodern theorists have stepped off the cliff that

negates any connection between word and image, Hall argues

that communities create contingent meanings through a

process of negotiation, with specific articulations made real only

in concrete, specific contexts. So common meanings arise

through shared usage, but those meanings are also open to

debate and change (which is often difficult but always possible).

I’m not arguing that this postmodern shift erases traditional texts

or narratives. Instead, I’m trying to make clear that our

traditional texts are changing, whether we like this our not. We

must work to understand the transformations and

fragmentations taking place so that we can work within them.

However, after the West v. HyperLaw case, IP regulation takes

a decidely pomo turn. Two key cases (in an intertextual web of

IP law texts) have begun to reshape the terrain if intellectual

property in the United States and elsewhere. I want to make

clear that I am not concerned very much with the specific legal

mechanisms and language, but with how these cases connect

up to much larger, cultural shifts in the ways that we produce,

consume, and circulate texts: For better or worse—or, in fact,

for better and worse—texts no longer function as discrete

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objects, but as contingent, fragmented objects in circulation, as

elements within constantly configured and shifting networks.

The point is not that all texts are completely fragmented and

resist connection. Instead, texts are broken down in order to

reconnect them, over and over again.

From one perspective, this development threatens traditional

educational ideas about text and learning; from another, less

common perspectives, these developments open up an entirely

new terrain in which rhetoric and composition might productively

move. We spend our time bemoaning the death documented in

the first instance at the cost of the possibilities contained within

the second.

Two recent sets of cases signal the movement toward

postmodernist understandings of text in culture. In the first set

below, I’ll consider recent cases involving the use of

coursepacks, primarily from the perspective of Stanford

University Press v. Michigan Document Service. In this case, as

well as the earlier Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corp.,

legal decisions have greatly restricted the Fair Use guidelines

that educators have traditionally used in compiling, then having

copying shops reproduce and sell coursepacks for their

courses. In the second set of cases, recent legislative actions

related to the Database Antipiracy Act and the Digital Millenium

Copyright Act place explicit emphasis on the idea that texts are

databases.

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Copyright, Coursepacks, and the Market

U.S. courts have ruled increasingly against the practice of

producing coursepacks—anthologies of previously published

(and still under copyright) material in small runs for academic

courses. In general, educators and copying shops acted under

the notion that such educational uses were protected by Fair

Use doctrine which, among other things, placed educational

reproduction of copyright material in a special, protected

category. But findings such as those in Basic Books, Inc. v.

Kinko’s Graphics Corporation and Princeton University Press v.

Michigan Document Services have served to greatly restrict the

freedom educators have in reproducing copyrighted works in

their classes.

Importantly, these cases seem to have shifted the terrain of

decisions away from the commonly used “four factors” (which

include key concerns such as purpose and character of the

reproduced work, nature of the work (factual versus fictional),

the amount and sustainability of the reproduced work) and

focused primarily on the last factor, the effect of the

reproduction on potential markets for the copyrighted work. As

Kenneth Crews notes,

Large-scale reproduction of copyrighted works has

become easier and cheaper with newer technologies,

leading to arguments that fair use ought to encompass the

practical realities of photocopying for classroom use.

Technology, on the other hand, has increased the

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feasibility of implementing licensing for photocopying. The

ease of offering and securing a license through Internet-

based transactions and the like has bolstered arguments

that fair use ought to be diminished to reflect a profitable

market that may now be more realistically captured.

Kenneth Crews

“Not the ‘Last Word’ on Photocopying and Coursepacks:

The Sixth Circuit Rules Against Fair Use in the MDS Case”

<http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/mdscase.html>

This shift is extremely important, because it opens a path away

from thinking of intellectual property as a “work”—as a relatively

extended, coherent whole—and toward thinking of it as

marketable chunks. Oddly, although we frequently lament the

fact that our students must now pay copyright permission fees

for material in the coursepacks we ask them to purchase for our

classes, we don’t often think about the postmodern shift that

resulted in this situation. So while we’ve come to grips with

postmodernism as a literary movement, we seem surprised

when the same phenomena surfaces in the economic realm.

And despite the realization that our culture increasingly values

texts that are broken down, rearranged, recombined, we rarely

teach forms of writing that support such production. We

unwittingly (or sometimes consciously) still think of writing as a

way to help the self become present to itself, as a method for

personal growth and discovery.

database | 24

Database Antipiracy Act and the World Intellectual Property Organization

The idea that texts are modular collections of information rather

than unified, coherent creative wholes is most directly

addressed, from a legal standpoint, in recent legislation and

case law regarding databases.

Companies who compile and sell access to online databases—

which is an enormously profitable enterprise for companies like

Lexis/Nexis and other specialized areas—companies began to

jealously guard both the structure and content of those

databases. A related set of legislative and legal discussions and

activities has supported this concept, beginning with cases such

as the earlier cited West Law v. HyperLaw (which indicated

collections of facts were not creative documents) through HR

2652 ( the “Collections of Information Antipiracy Act”) and its

resurfacing in the form of HR 354. Although the future shape

and trajectory of these developments are by no means certain,

in general they point toward a society in which “writing” as we

know it is no longer the premier textuality.

In essence, what supporters of these bills are contesting is the

division between “creative” works like novels and “non-creative”

works like databases. Dissolving this boundary would undo the

notion that ideas develop out of the “genius” of lone individual

and that the whole notion of creativity is contingent (and

shifting).

I don’t want to be seen as saying that this sort of greed is good

database | 25

—only that we should have been able to predict it. Furthermore,

despite whatever might happen with single specific pieces of

legislation, we’re moving slowly toward a situation where

corporations will hold proprietary rights to collections of

information.

WIPO Protests

As consumer advocate James Love argues, these new types of

legislation will tend to change how we think about intertextuality

and writing.

The [WIPO] treaty seeks, for the first time, to permit firms

to ‘own’ facts they gather, and to restrict and control the

redissemination of those facts. The new property right

would lie outside (and on top) of the copyright laws, and

create an entirely new and untested form of regulation that

would radically change the public’s current rights to use

and disseminate facts and statistics.

James Love,

Consumer Project on Technology

Views on both sides of this issue are polarized; in general,

legislation has given special rights to scientific research and

journalism, so that news reporting will still have some leeway

(not that we should be complacent—I assume that many

corporations would also like those rights removed). But most of

the corporations that are vocally opposed to this legislation do

database | 26

so on the grounds that they should be able to copy whole-cloth

the products of other corporations and remarket them, in the

way that HyperLaw wanted to be able to directly copy West

Laws books and sell them. So it’s difficult to decide who to

cheer for here.

The opponents of the HR 2652 were largely successful in

getting the database protection language removed from Digital

Millennium Copyright Act that was eventually passed. However,

the bill itself resurfaced shortly thereafter as HR 354.

Occasional reversals aside, the collection of pre-existing

content, even relatively fine-grained and factual content such as

sporting events scores, is increasingly considered to be a

creative act, at least in terms of legal and financial aspects.

Deep Linking on Web Sites

Finally, perhaps more closely linked to our own traditional

concerns, there has grown a bitter debate on the World Wide

Web and in the courts about whether or not people need

permission to link to someone else’s pages. Tradition, growing

out academic ideas about scholarship and science, has said

that citation should be free, that pointing to the works of others

is a necessary and socially valuable thing.

At the same time, companies complaining about the practice of

linking to pages point out that their economic model relies on

assuming users of their site move top-down through the site,

often viewing advertisements on the way. If users jump directly

database | 27

to a page on the site five levels down, then the advertisements

won’t be seen—and the website owner won’t be compensated.

So many sites, such as InfoWorld (which I’ll discuss in another

section) have begun experimenting with “linking policies” that

attempt require users to request permission before linking to

material on the site.

This whole debate illustrates another of the contradictions

between two models of practice: academic/scientific citation

(which holds that knowledge should be free) and economic

models (which holds that information should be in circulation,

but it must earn money in doing so).

In 1999, the popular print- and web-based trade magazine

InfoWorld posted this linking policy on their website:

Like most online publications, InfoWorld Electric has a

policy regarding links. When we refer to a link, we mean a

hypertext link, where you post the URL (Uniform Resource

Locator) of some content on our site to your site. This can

be simply including the link in text form or attaching a URL

to one of our logos for the reader to click on.

To link to an article on InfoWorld Electric, send an e-mail

request to Meera Srinivas with the URL of the InfoWorld

content you want to link to. If your request is approved, we

will ask you to confirm back to us the exact URL of the

place on your site where we can find the link.

database | 28

<http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStat.pl?/

readerservices/permissions.htm>

As you can see, what they’re doing here is attempting to

regulate who points to subpages on their site. The regulation

can be seen as serving several purposes, one of which is to

discourage rampant linking; in addition, the policy helps

InfoWorld track where users may be entering the site in order to

maximize advertising exposure (and to improve demographic

data collection). InfoWorld’s website, like many similar sites,

exchanges “free” news about the information economy for

“eyeballs”. Web communication has been referred to as

“narrowcasting” in its ability to target well defined and discrete

demographic groups. Advertisers, the argument goes, can pitch

their wares to carefully selected audiences, groups that are

more likely than the general population to respond by

purchasing a product. At a broader level, InfoWorld’s policy

represent a general and increasing tendency on the part of

contemporary corporations to control information without much

regard to current value.

After a great deal of public protest, InfoWorld rescinded the

policy, although I think—taken in light of the earlier IP legal

developments—it signals a trend in understanding how and why

people cite each other.1

1 National Public Radio, for example, briefly issued a linking policy in

2002 that, like InfoWorld’s earlier policy, required users to request

permission before linking. After protests, NPR adjusted the policy so

that users, in general, could link to NPR’s site as long as they didn’t

database | 29

I’m a little leery of the model that says we cite only to earn

money, but it’s important that we recognize that trend in order to

better deal with it. Information increasingly holds value in a

commodity sense, not for its ability to get anything done or

produce value.

Where Does this Leave Us?

So we have here two oddly similar but oddly contradictory

trajectories: scholars in rhet/comp, propounding the decline of

the unified subject while simultaneously saying that text is

outside of the economic sphere. On a second set of not-quite-

as-contradictory trajectories, we have postmodern capital

continually fragmenting “text” into its most discrete components

in order to put them in motion—because movement is what they

extract value from. But what seems clear is that this

fragmentation and circulation is postmodernism.

Where that leaves us, then, is in a very difficult—but also very

exciting—situation, one in which we have to both participate

and resist. We cannot just give ourselves over to maximizing

capital or completely fragmenting the self. I don’t have to

rehearse the problems with that route; even the most pomo

among us has tried it only to find out it doesn’t work. Instead, I

would argue, what we have to do is understand this system

better, to participate in it, but critically.

suggest NPR supports any third party or to generate profit.

database | 30

New Responsibilities in Construction

I want to make two quick points, then move into some

examples. This new understanding of writing can lead us to

some important considerations for teaching writing.

1. We can’t separate writing from the economic sphere. We

can attempt to keep access open, but we can no longer ignore

intellectual property laws and pretend that they will go away.

Just as importantly, an expanded notion of writing will serve to

help us have a voice in the types of writing that go on outside

our classroom—not just the essays or poetry that a handful of

students will write, but in the web pages they design, in the

databases they build. So this should act to give us a broader

sphere to address rather than a narrower one.

2. This new notion of writing as at least partly—perhaps

primarily—about valuing connection will let us argue to our

students that information is not neutral. Collection is a social

and political act; there are not mere disembodied facts, but

choices. I’ll return to this idea later in a brief discussion of

articulation theory, but I’d like to show some examples first.

I admit that I find the incessant commodification of knowledge a

depressing trend. And a part of me would agree that the recent

move toward extending copyright apparently indefinitely, toward

making text a terrain for profit and little else, will often make the

rich richer and the poor poorer. I also, though, have to admit

that our field’s insistence on thinking of texts as “free” and

database | 31

articulating creativity as the production of “original” text have

often blinded us to enormous cultural shifts. More importantly,

our participation within the capitalist system as teachers and

textbook authors often makes our protests over IP law a little

disingenuous.

In other sections, I’ll attempt to outline some of the more

productive implications of shifts in textuality, ways of writing and

teaching writing that are emerging from the same conditions of

fragmentation and recombination. For while some of the

implications of postmodernism are problematic, that does not

exhaust the trend. Indeed, once we begin to understand and

teach forms of writing that value contingency and arrangement,

we will begin to see that the positive cultural and educational

aspects of this shift hold a great deal of potential.

Web Logs

Web Logs (or “blogs” as they’re often called) have existed in

various forms for since nearly the beginning of the Web,

although they’ve risen dramatically in popularity starting in

2002. As a genre, they’re relatively straightforward: in essence,

a blog is a frequently updated website consisting primarily of

short posts by someone. Somewhat like a web browsing diary,

blogs typically include brief summaries or mentions of other

sites on the web, with links to the sites described. New entries

to the blog are placed near the top, pushing old entries down

(eventually moving off the main page to archive pages).

Weblogs are sometimes dismissed as diaries--and in some

instances, that’s all they are. But as I’ll describe in another

database | 32

section, blogs differ in some key ways from simple diaries (not

the least of which is that they’re aggressively public).

[image: “use-scripting-news.gif”]

In this screen, one of the first to popularize and evangelize the

genre, software industry insider Dave Weiner arranges a series

of very brief observations, comments, and—especially—links to

other sites in a reverse chronological format. Down the middle

of the page, each paragraph (or occasionally more than one

paragraph) forms an entry, most of which are previews or

teasers linked to other web pages, most of which aren’t

authored by Weiner. In reading this, one gets the sense of

massive and ongoing interconnection; there’s the chatty voice—

I’m not sure if it’s a “true” voice, but that’s a moot point—the

voice of Dave Winer connecting us up to all he knows; at the

same time, there’s the distinct sense that Dave himself is

constructed by these connections over time and across space.

The text-that-is-Dave (or at least “Userland” Dave) is not a

unified voice, but a dispersed and changing web.

This is a relatively common and non-shocking analysis, but it’s

a starting point at how we might value writing in our classes and

our scholarship. Although at first glance, weblogs may appear

to be a trivial genre—a laundry list of events and observations

elevated to a public spectacle—they exhibit some key

characteristics that rhetoric and composition teachers frequently

search for in writing and reading assignments. They exist and

interact with complex rhetorical situations, ranging from

database | 33

public/private diaries:

[image: “sunday-hero-weblog.gif”]

to consumer-lead support systems for computer systems:

[image: “macintouch.gif”]

They make concrete intertextual connections and analyses.

They provide interaction among multiple authors in community,

face-to-face and/or virtual:

[image: “media-weblog.jpg”]

Weblogs such as these require authors to read other texts, to

analyze those texts, and respond to those texts in writing.

Not incidentally, weblogs also provide a useful working example

of—and space for communication within—a postmodern

textuality that most current pedagogical work in rhetoric and

composition has problems approaching. In several ways,

weblogs provide a complement to website authoring, an activity

increasingly used in rhetoric and composition courses. In many

ways, though, weblogs push more insistently at the postmodern

tendencies of text: they are by definition fluid and shifting; they

are so easy to produce and modify as to seem nearly

disposable (but never really disappearing, with old text being

archived to create a searchspace of shadow information).1

database | 34

Weblogs represent a symbolic-analytic form of writing: authors

scan the web, culling out interesting bits of information,

rearranging them, posting pointers to them on blogs. They

speak to varied audiences, but typically some group loosely

organized around a set of common topics. Recursively, weblogs

become terrain for a second tier of activities, with weblog

authors reading each other’s blogs, commenting on them,

scavenging new stories from each other in a system of mutual

self-reference. Meta-browsing tools like NetNewsWire provide

weblog readers and authors with tools to assist in managing

large amounts of information spread across multiple weblogs.

[image: “netnewswire.jpg”]

All of this raises, then, a host of additional important questions:

what defines a weblog compared to the more general website?

What is the structure of a weblog (both internally and

externally)? How do particular weblogs generate and hold

readers? How do readers of a log become participants? All of

these are issues that bear importance for rhetoric and

composition as we attempt to find a place in the online world.

Community Weblogs

To some extent, many early and current weblogs could be

framed as linear, individual voices, the diaries I alluded to

earlier. From a postmodern perspective, though, their incessant

dispersal--the constant centrifugal force that encourages

readers to click links and move away from their current

database | 35

location--suggests an ironic reversal of a traditional diary’s

attempts to unify the writing subject by making the subject both

speaker and listener. In a weblog, the subject is composed of

exterior texts, constantly moving outward.

But another type of weblog pushes the dispersal even farther.

Communal sites such as Slashdot and Plastic construct a

social, dispersed subjectivity that constantly deconstructs

narrative, presenting the self as an ongoing amalgam of

multiple voices. In the Plastic screenshot shown here, the

weblog itself has been broken down, made intensely multiple

and fragmented. The individual stories, summaries, and links to

other sites are contributed by members of the community. Each

story on the main page links to subpages for discussion and

debate by the community.

Although we have often thought of online spaces as supporting

various levels of community, one interesting feature here is the

way in which the landscape has been surfaced. If this is a city, it

would be Tokyo or Los Angeles rather than Paris or Detroit.

Each discussion competes for attention, the lead stories near

the left and top cycling in and out, constantly rearranging.

Plastic is, in effect, a fragmented database of community. Is

Plastic a text? Most of us would provisionally say yes, but with

reservations. We would be more likely to think of the individual

stories and responses as texts because they are something

more like what we teach our students to write. But I would like

to argue that these gathered texts themselves compose a larger

text that challenges our ideas about what it means to write. It

database | 36

might be comforting to think of Plastic as an edited collection,

but there are several key distinctions. First, Plastic is not a

stable collection but an ongoing and contingent set of texts that

swim in and out of existence (most stories begin and then ebb

away within a handful of days). Second, Plastic is not edited in

the traditional sense. Most edited works rely on a small number

of gatekeepers to select texts for inclusion (often only a single

editor).

[image: “plastic-main.jpg”]

But on Plastic, after participants reach a certain level of

experience as members of the community, they are allowed to

vote on (and suggestion revisions to) short pieces submitted by

any member of the community. In this sense, Plastic is edited

by itself. Third, we would have to agree that “writing” Plastic

involves key activities beyond the production of text, ranging

from the programming of a database system that allows the site

to change over time as new stories move in and old ones move

out. And the interface to the site itself constitutes another

important form of writing, given how it influences how much

content will fit into a single story, how stories are arranged in

relation to each other, and more. Participants in Plastic, like

most community discussants, engage in ongoing articulation

and rearticulation, disputing, bringing in references to other web

resources to illustrate points, constantly negotiating contingent

meanings. For example, in the story currently in the lead

position in the screenshot earlier,

database | 37

Dubya Will Give Peace A Chance (In N. Korea)

found on AP via Yahoo

edited by John (Plastic)

written by kilroy

"How is North Korea's nuclear program different from Iraq,

you might ask? Well, for one thing, North Korea's is much,

much farther along. In addition to being on the verge of

possessing nuclear technology (they already have material

a-plenty), North Korea is currently developing long-

distance missile technology... apparently those missiles

they shot over Japan in '98 don't have quite the range

they're looking for," kilroy writes. "And unlike Iraq, which at

least has the decency to lie about its nuclear intentions,

Kim Jong Il has announced he has no intention of stopping

his program. For a minute, I was worried we might have to

delay that whole invade-Iraq-tomorrow thing, but luckily

Bush is seeking diplomatic solutions, and Japan (which is

looking more like Kuwait by the day) has begun

negotiations. (55 comments - all new)

[ join the discussion ]

As is standard on Web sites, each of the underlined pieces of

text indicates a link to another source on the web (eleven

separate links in the brief write-up), ranging from stories on

CNN and Yahoo News through email addresses of participants.

In the discussion linked to the brief story, participants ask

questions, offer opinions and resources, and challenge each

database | 38

other over a range of issues, including the 1994 negotiation of

the Nuclear Freeze Agreement, Selig S. Harrison’s book

Korean Endgame, and other geopolitical issues and (rare on

semi-anonymous discussion boards), changes of opinion and

negotiated agreements.

None of these features are markedly unique or revolutionary.

For despite my distinctions between traditional editing and the

production of Plastic, there are similarities between the two. I’m

suggesting, though, that the form of writing that is Plastic is part

of a larger trend away from traditional ideas about text and

writing. The postmodernization of text should encourage us to

see something like Plastic as more than an interesting

exception to or special case of writing; instead, these texts are

increasingly the more commonly used object. Hypertext pioneer

Ted Nelson once claimed that hypertext, the structure of nodes

connected by links, was actually the more general form of text;

linear text was a special case. In this way, we might come to

think of these fragmented and multiple texts as the norm, and

traditional essays and narratives being special cases.

Database Design and Web Search Engines

In terms of influence, database and web search engine design

are two primary forms of online writing. Rhetoric and

composition, however, pay little attention to such activities,

ceding them to computer programming and software

engineering. There are, obviously, some aspects of these

database | 39

activities that fall outside the expertise of most rhetoric and

composition teachers. However, by ignoring them as forms of

writing, we make their influence invisible. In addition, we often

fail to take from them important methods for thinking about

communication and work, things that could influence our own

work in useful ways.

First, like Plastic and Slashdot, the space of a search engine

screen has itself been painstakingly designed, with various

sections written to satisfy an extremely large number of

audiences (this is a text read by millions of people a day—we

should all hope for such an audience). And, as with traditional

texts, the writers have thought very hard about their audience,

addressing them, persuading them, moving them. The screen

may seem a touch dense to our “refined” aesthetic tastes (“less

is more”), but in the next ten years, this sort of jammed interface

will be the norm; it’s a new aesthetic (“more is more”). In fact,

the very act of disobeying this aesthetic will itself be a marketing

ploy, as in the case of Google’s site:

[image: “google.jpg”]

Google, unlike most other search engines, relies heavily on

sales of search engine software rather than advertising for

revenue. Even Google has, over the last year, begun integrating

additional text into their search engine interface; what once held

a handful of links now holds thirteen different text entry or

interaction elements. Additionally, Google now includes

specialized search engines for Usenet discussion groups:

database | 40

[image: “google-groups.jpg”]

images

[image: “google-images.jpg”]

advanced searching

[image: “google-advanced.jpg”]

a fee-based service for web research

[image: “google-answers.jpg”]

a news page automatically generated by analyzing news links

on the Web:

[image: “google-news.jpg”]

and a hierarchically organized index of the Web:

[image: “google-directory.jpg”]

These texts are collaboratively written from both pictures and

words, not only in the traditional sense of a number of people at

the search engine HQ deciding what words to put where.

Databases and search engines are also collaborative in the

database | 41

radically postmodernist sense that each individual user rewrites

the space as they enter search terms and the text reorganizes

its billions of bits of information around that specific query.

Importantly, if we value this search engine—which is in effect

the front end to a database—if we value this as a form of

writing, then we can then begin to argue that the sorts of

choices one makes in writing the database—for example, what

categories to include, what to exclude; which category to put

first; etc.—we can start to argue that these choices involve

responsibilities to the reader and to society, just as we now do

in other, more traditional forms of writing. In fact, I would argue

that the sorts of writing that goes on in the examples I’ve

covered here will have much broader social effects than what

we currently teach. Hypertext theory and practice suggested

some of these possibilities, but in the long run the forms of

hypertext that we ended up with looked a lot like slightly more

complex versions of traditional texts.

For example, searching on the phrase “human rights’ gives

differing results on Yahoo, Lycos, and Ask. On Yahoo and Ask,

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch websites score

the number one and two positions respectively. However,

Amnesty does not appear in the top ten cites on Lycos

(although Human Rights Watch is in the number one spot).

Additionally, both Lycos and Yahoo include three sites in the

“Sponsored” section that occurs above the standard Web

search results (sponsored sites pay an advertising fee to show

up at the top of searches on specific terms): ECHR Fraud (a

database | 42

site about alleged fraud in the European Court of Human

Rights), Ideal Works (a catalogue of human rights issues

related to specific brands of products), and the web site for H.

Victor Conde, a human rights lawyer. Ask includes a sponsored

link as well, but to Questia, an online library.

[images: “yahoo-human-rights.jpg”, “lycos-human-

rights.jpg” and “ask-human-rights.jpg” all need to be on

this page somewhere, near each other if possible.]

Although we now commonly help our students look critically at

the results they receive from searches on the web as well as

methods for evaluating resources, our thinking about search

engines tends to stop there.

In the classroom, search engines can provide us with points of

departure, beyond the obvious questions I raised above. In an

important sense, understanding the search engine as itself a

form of writing helps us understand the relationship between

composition and programming: a search engine works by

automatic, contingent rhetorics.

A user’s query operates a machine that develops a unique

textual space, one shifting and reordering itself based on the

changing volumes of the world wide web in conjunction with the

specifics of the query and the engine’s inherent qualities

(method of indexing, search space, rotating banner ads and

paid site placements, user screensize and resolution, etc.). The

ubiquity and power of search engines makes it difficult to

database | 43

dismiss as a serious form of text. Although they may seem

trivial to us, the complexities of search engine design suggest

writing as not merely the static arrangement of text—something

that even those richest standard hypertexts can escape—but an

active artifact, one put into motion by interaction with others.

Indeed, search engines make concrete and visible many of the

things that hypertext theorists have long argued for: contingent,

networked texts, composed with large and shifting social

spaces out of the literally millions of voices.

[image: error-404.jpg]

That is not to say that programming search engines should,

itself, become a primary activity for writing teachers and

students. Instead, we can take observations about search

engines—analyses, observations of real users, etc.—and apply

them to text in order to create related spaces that challenge our

notions of what text means. The accumulated social text of error

404, for example, was drafted in a graduate computers and

composition seminar I taught. The “text” represents an

accumulation and structuring of massive sets of quotations

gathered from theoretical and practical course readings during

the semester. As part of that course, we discussed the texts,

wrote traditional papers interpreting and challenging those texts,

designed websites, and completed the sorts of assignments

typical of such a seminar.

In order to challenge ourselves to investigate the permeable

boundaries of the concept of “text” or “essay”, we decided to

database | 44

write an essay that included almost no “original” text or linear

thread. Drafted initially in Storyspace over the course of several

weeks by the class and then translated into HTML for interface

design and web access, error 404 functioned as a hypertext

about our course readings. But unlike a more traditional text,

error 404 includes no explicit apparatus that interpreted either

the text (that is, we never explicitly wrote text about the texts in

the network); in addition, error 404 contained no explicit critical

framework apparatus that interpreted the network text. Instead,

the text is set into action by user clicks as they navigate a

contingent space of multiply juxtaposed other texts. But unlike

“traditional” hypertext, error 404 explicitly avoids any “original”

text, working more like a symbolic-analytic collage than an

essay or story.

From a traditional composition perspective, error 404 is not,

itself a text, a creative act composed by an individual or a

community. In fact, when we submitted the text to an online

journal, the reviews came back split, with a hypertext theorist

praising the innovation in form while two other reviewers

pointedly requested an essay “framing” the work. The critical

framework is implied of course, made explicit only in verbal

discussions in the class (“What should we link to this chunk of

text in order to challenge it or argue against it? What other texts

does this text suggest?”) or in book chapters or essays like one

I wrote for a collection on computers and postmodernism

(Taylor and Ward) or the text you’re currently reading. Or in the

reader’s mind and actions. But to traditional readers (even

avowed literary postmodern theorists), error 404 is not a text

database | 45

without the traditional, creative framework.

[image: “error-404-2.jpg”]

From a database perspective, error 404 is a framework for

producing meaningful interactions. The interface provides a

surface onto which changing pieces of information are arranged

and rearranged in response to user’s actions. As with many

complex hypertexts (and a database might be conceived of an

n-to-n connected hypertext), the “text” does not exist except as

interaction with reader. In this way (and also like other

interpretations of hypertext), texts are fluid, contingent, and

constantly changing. Authors are more like designers or

deconstructivist information architects.

Is error 404—or a search engine—merely a derivative work?

Only in the sense that it is composed of pieces of other texts.

But that is true of any text—work on intertextuality has taught us

that all texts are composed of numerous other texts. Are these

sorts of texts merely functional? Only in the sense that the text

must be operated or started and run by someone. But that is

also true of any text—work on reader response, cultural studies,

usability studies, and a whole host of theoretical and practical

fields has taught us that meaning does not inhere in a static

text.

Nonlinear Media Editing

And with guitars it’s a lot about getting layers, which is

database | 46

great with Pro Tools. We would sit and track two hours

worth of guitars and cut them up and loop them and build a

whole wall of sound, which was the approach with the

whole album.

Ray DiLeo,

Engineer/Programmer,

Filter, Title of Record

And these new forms of writing have moved on—way ahead of

nearly all of us—into other spheres of mediated life. Nonlinear

video and audio production systems such as Avid and ProTools

are radically affecting the ways people in video and audio

approach their work.

As noted by Ray DiLeo, an engineer and programmer who

worked with the alt-rock group Filter notes, writing and

recording a song is frequently no longer about a group of

musicians gathering around a single microphone (a method

surviving in and revived in bluegrass and folk artists such as the

Del McRoury Band). It’s not even simply the use of multiple

tracks pioneered Les Paul that combine the work of single,

isolated musicians into one apparently simultaneous song.

We’re not even talking about “tweaking” a finished product to

add in a new rhythm track, something musicians such as Steely

Dan began doing obsessively many decades ago. Over the last

century, the virtual space of music performance has mutated,

shifting from on-the-spot, realtime performance toward a

recursive, manipulation, filtering (no pun intended), translation,

database | 47

and reorganization of information apart from the bodied

constraints of live performance. An environment like ProTools

still allows realtime performance, but it also opens a radically

different space for composition.

[image: dies.jpg]

In the Spring of 2001, I began working with David Dies, a

graduate student in Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam,

who worked extensively with ProTools to design commissioned

pieces. During one of my observations, David worked on a six-

minute piece designed to be played from CD as

accompaniment to a live trumpet. Here are some selections

from the observation log I created during one session, in which

David worked on what he called “pre-composition”.

time video/audio

3:20 D explains he’s created a new file in ProTools with 8 blank tracks It’s “a canvas ... and palette in one” accumulating a mass of information on which to draw during composition

8:20 d gets paper, explains that he doesn’t do a lot of sketch work, but is going to write down notes about interesting tambres that he can come back to later. begins actively moving among three MIDI keyboards, Mac ProTools workstation, and pad of paper (multiple sources and spaces for information)

25:25 after long sequence of tones, “I have half a mind to capture this” “I’m not wild about the initial [...] I want to capture that second half to see if I still like it when it’s isolated. [plays tone]. See? That’s cool.” actively fragmenting existing sounds

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30:20 “once this is captured, I tend to not come back to the keyboard” “It’s so manipulable there” (in ProTools). Says in a previous composition he created melodies from a scale (by cutting up). explains why he’s recording source tones that he’s played. typically likes to work from the virtual palette of sounds during composition rather than moving back to MIDI keyboard. composition for D emphasized rearrangement, selection rather than production.

In these transcripts, we begin to see evidence of a new sort of

writing—composing processes (the phrase arcing over both

music and text) supporting work as experimentation,

arrangement, filtering, movement, rehearsal and reversal.

These terms will be familiar to writing teachers—they’re what

we often struggle to push students towards in their own

composing process, with varying levels of success. ProTools

reminds us of the potential (as yet largely untapped) in

nonlinear writing spaces such as Storyspace or Dreamweaver.

The cultural and technological forces contributing to the

development and use of those writing environments align with

those surrounding ProTools. But I want to suggest that

ProTools represents the next step (to call it an evolutionary

step would to posit an unsupportable teleology), a picture of

where composition may be headed. Reflecting about and acting

within that picture can help us develop our own productive,

critical responses.

One key aspect of ProTools is the way in which it deconstructs

the separation between artifact and performance, long a

stumbling block for composition.

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Web Architectures

Here’s a second example of a new sort of text, one that some of

you are probably familiar with, the MOO. This is the ProNoun

MOO which I worked with for several years (or, depending on

who you ask, should take the blame for). In addition to serving

twenty or thirty sections a semester of business writing and tech

writing courses, we also allow other classes and projects to use

it. Here, Teena Carnegie and others have constructed spaces

for a conference they held in 2000, attended (virtually) by

people from all over the US and Canada.

[image: use-pronoun-moo.gif]

MOO spaces hold two types of writing, one familiar to us and

the other relatively unknown. In one instance, we have the texts

written in the space—the paper icons on the right side, for

example, hold draft conference presentations that participants

will read prior to the session so that they can discuss the texts

in realtime. And there are the numerous words on the screen

describing the room and actions one can take in the room or on

one of the objects in the room.

But those spatial words are actually part of a different order of

text in ProNoun, the architecture of the space. If we want to

value texts that are constructed, accumulated, arranged, then

we need to think about architecture as a form of writing.

Numerous philosophers have noted the connection between

architecture and philosophy; I think, following Derrida, that we

need to start to thinking of writing as architecture. I won’t go into

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a lot of details about this right now, but just want to suggest that

there is much in architectural theory that can help us think about

writing at a number of levels. Jay Bolter claimed that texts have

always constructed different spaces; today, we more frequently

think of ourselves as moving within texts—we navigate

websites, surf channels, browse and manipulate, remake. And

lest we consider architecture too functionalist, we should also

follow the movement into deconstructivist and postmodernist

architecture in order to begin understanding texts that are

postmodernist but still function.

Forestalling Closure

Important to my overall project here is the ways that articulation

theory and symbolic-analytic work moves through

fragmentation. They don’t deny the force of postmodernism or

postmodern capitalism. Instead, articulation theory requires a

responsible stance toward contingency and fragmentation.

From an articulation theory stance, writers—or designers, more

accurately—actively map fragments back into contexts

recursively. There aren’t any guaranteed social meanings or

knowing authorial asides. There are only social struggles,

uneven forces, the incessant act of connecting and

disconnecting the local and the global.

If we start to understand connection as a form of writing, then

articulation theory can offer us a way to understand the “mere”

uncreative act of selection and connection as very active and

creative. Perhaps as importantly, it moves the idea of database

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construction—or any sort of connective writing, like hypertext—

away from technical/functional skills only and toward the

sense that making decisions about how to arrange “facts” is a

very important process, one that involves ethical responsibilities

on the part of the writer/designer.

And in the here-now of the world wide web, of the blipvert

soundbite, of the writing that is no longer writing as we once

knew it, we are all finding ourselves responsible for making

connections, for finding ways to learn and to teach new forms of

making cultural meanings.

Exercises: Pointing Toward Possibilities

1. The Communit(ies)y of Weblogs

Teacher’s Notes

The weblog assignment provides students with opportunities to

think about writing as an activity that’s simultaneously social

and individual. In some ways, authoring a weblog will seem

similar to designing a website, another useful student

assigment; weblogs are, in most cases, actually a subtype of

website. They include, however, specific characteristics than

can help students understand intertextuality and new forms of

writing. By asking students to produce a steady stream of

material over time, writing a weblog requires them to see the log

as more integrated into their lives. And the insistence on writing

as a form of quotation--weblogs invariably include a mix of

“original” text and text copied from other weblogs or sites--

students (and teachers) learn to question the “original”/”copied”

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dichotomy.

Time Frame

Four weeks. Week 1: students read one or two weblogs,

discuss characteristics and variations in class. Week 2 and 3:

students begin a weblog, posting an average of once per day.

Amount of in-class discussion can vary depending on level of

students, how weblogs are working, etc.Also, students read at

three or more other student weblogs and refer to them in their

own. Week 4: students discuss weblog experiences, draft brief

report.

Timeframe can be expanded for full semester, with weblog

threaded throughout their work. Can also be contracted if the

amount of weblog authoring is reduced.

Possible Variations

Collaborative weblogs (from two to six students per weblog).

Assignment Overview

Weblogs, or “blogs” as they’re sometimes called, offer a new

form of writing on the World Wide Web. Unlike traditional Web

sites, blogs usually require very little in the way of technical

expertise. Many blog sites even offer free onsite hosting and

Web-based editing features that make writing a blog a very

simple process.

But like many simple technologies, blogs come in an enormous

range of classifications and uses. There are blogs for

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independent music groups, disaffected college students,

professional organizations, and more. Some rely heavily on

uploaded webcam shots while others exist as scrolling words on

a screen. Some are individually authored; others are

collaborative works; still others combine a “main” author page

with extensive collaborative discussion pages. Analyzing and

designing blogs can help you think about how people read

texts, how people author texts, and how different texts function

for different groups of users.

Analyse a Weblog

Begin by selecting a blog to analyze. To find examples, you can

go to any large search engine and search on “weblog” or “blog”.

Alternatively, you can find a site that hosts weblogs, such as

http://www.blogger.com/, and search lists of different blogs on

that site.

After you’ve selected a site, answer the following questions:

1. Who reads this site?

2. Are the readers of the site “present” in the site

somehow? (Are they referred to by the writer? Is there

a discussion section?)

3. What is the “grain size” of the posts on the site? What

is the shortest entry? What is the longest?

4. Does the site have a history? Are older posts moved to

an archive that can be read somehow?

5. How do you think the writer envisions the site? What

does it mean to them? Why are they writing the site?

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6. If the site includes images, what are the image of?

What are they supposed to mean?

7. Does the writer belong to a larger weblog community?

8. How does this site differ from other sites in the web, in

general?

9. Are blogs more like journals, newspapers, websites, tv

shows, radio shows, novels, or what?

After you’ve analyzed the weblog, share your reports with other

people in class and compare your findings. Are there common

aspects running through the analyses of blogs? Which blogs

seem the most interesting to your class? Which seem the least?

Running a Weblog

Either as a class or individually, locate a site that provides free

hosting for weblogs or locate a solution that will let you host a

site on your own server.

1. Decide on a topic and scope for your blog. What will it

cover? Who will the readers be?

2. Select a name and a theme or look and feel if one is

available. Think about both your purpose and your

audience as you determine names and themes,

because these will both affect how your audiences see

your site.

3. Begin your blog.

4. Either in the blog or in a separate, private journal

(depending on whether or not personal notes seem to

be appropriate in the blog itself), track your thoughts

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about the act of writing the blog. Does it feel weird? Do

you have a hard time writing? Why?

Final Analysis

After writing the blog for at least two weeks, report back to the

class on your experiences. How do your experiences compare

with others?

Search Engines and Texts

Teacher’s Notes

The first phase of the search engine and text assigment begins

with a commonly used method for helping students understand

the importance of looking critical at web (and other) resources.

By comparing the varying results they receive from search

engines on the same query, students will learnvaluable

background information about search engines and indices. The

goal of this portion of the assignment isn’t to get them to pick

the “best” search engine--there is no single best; there are only

different types. So although students (and nearly everyone)

may have a favorite search engine, students (and nearly

everone) needs to learn both how that search engine works as

well as instances in which using a different search engine would

be helpful.Comparing reports and findings will help them flesh

out this understanding.

The second part of the assignment asks students to look a little

deeper, at the notion that search engines are, in a sense, texts

to be analyzed: what does it mean, culturally, politically,

economically, ideologically, for onet ype of result to come up

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higher in a search engine hit list than another site? Who made

decisions that affected how the results looked?

Timeframe

From one day to one week, depending on the complexity of the

final report.

Variation

Can use either collaborative or individual work. In classes

emphasizing or experimenting with creative writing, a “found art”

sort of project could be added near the end, that asked students

to select and interpret the search engine texts as creative

documents.

Assignment Overview

For many users, search engines of one form or another are a

primary point of entry into the Web. They structure the web in

both predetermined and contingent ways: Yahoo organizes the

web into a hierarchy of categories; Google crawls the web and

indexes key terms in a searchable database. Different search

engines offer different—sometimes dramatically different—

responses to the same search query.

Assignment

As a class, list as many search engines as possible. Then,

randomly assign three search engines to each student (most

search engine will be assigned more than once, which is fine—

it’ll give you something to compare in the final reports).

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Also as a class, come up with three different types of search

queries. Which three depends on your class, but try to come up

with three that are very different in terms of who might type

them in or what topics they apply to. For example, here are

three examples

1. weezer

2. discount paperclips

3. discrimination

For each search and each search engine, record the following

information

1. How many hits did the search engine find?

2. What were the top ten hits?

3. Did all the hits seem related?

4. Where there hits that seemed to make no sense?

Analysis

Write or present a brief report summarizing your findings. Be

sure to provide concrete examples to illustrate your

findings.How did each search engine organize the information?

Were there entries on the list that were included because

someone had paid to have them there (sometimes called

“sponsored”)?

In comparing findings with your classmates, were there major

differences between what each search engine found?

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Who’s Visible on the Web: The Politics of Search Engines

Teacher’s Notes

Although the World Wide Web is often characterized as a

democractic, equalizing space, access to the Web--particularly

to Web-authoring tools--remains unequal, drawn along rather

predictable linesof race, gender, and wealth. In addition, the

Web itself--for a variety of important reasons--represents itself

as predominantly monocultural.

The “Who’s Visible” assigment asks students to look hard at

how different demographic (social, gender, racial, etc.) are

constructed visibly on the World Wide Web. The goal of the

assignment is not to place blame for constructing certain

subjectivities, but to understand the complexity of the topic. In

addition, as students themselves begin authoring websites they

will need to make conscious decisions about who is

represented in their own work, and how they represent others.

Note: This exercise requires students to enter racial and

gendered terms into search engines. It is likely that some of

these terms will be linked to sexually explicit and/or offensive

sites. This is entirely part of the goal of the

exercise, which is to link racial and gender terms to their

presentation on the Internet. However, students will need to be

given the option to opt out of that portion of the assignment for

personal reasons. In addition, we would discourage against

demonstrating this activity in a public computer lab in order to

avoid subjecting participants to potentially harassing sites.

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Timeframe

One day to one week (depending on complexity of report)

Variations

To minimize potentially explicit or offensive search results,

instructors can assignment specific search terms and/or

engines (after testing them to vet results). Could concentrate on

subset of possible terms--who is represented, graphically or

textually in searches on specific occupational titles, for

example?

Assignment Overview

Although the Web was originally created as a relatively

specialized network for publishing scientific work, it is rapidly

becoming a major cultural force. As the Web becomes a more

common, the presence or absence of different types of people

within the Web becomes a political issue. If the Web is

represented as the domain of a particular group or subgroup of

people based on their race, color, sex—or whatever—then, in a

recursive way, users outside of that group are implicitly

discouraged from using the Web.

The majority/minority distinction is, in some ways, a culturally

relative construction: consider the majority/minority faces you

would see at a meeting of the Boy Scouts of America versus the

local National Organization of Women chapter versus the

playground at your local elementary school. In each of those

contexts, majority/minority divisions differ dramatically.

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Assignment

In order to help you think about who is present and who is

absent on the Web, choose a search engine and enter your

own name into the query. Do you find many hits? Are there

other people with your name?

Next, come up with a set of demographic terms that describe

yourself – race, ethnicity, gender, age, etc. Enter those terms

into a search engine: what types of entries come up? How

many?

Finally, come up with a set of “Other” terms—for each of your

own demographic terms, list a common term used to describe

people unlike you. Try to avoid relying on derogatory terms.

For more information about Web demographics, see the

following sites:

- Basic, long-term WWW user demographic surveys: <

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/>

- Domain name registration demographics:

<http://www.domainstats.com/>

- Early MIT article on measuring the growth of the Web: <

http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/growth/>

- Nua’s massive database of Internet surveys and reports: <

http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi>.

Online Communities and Architectures

Teacher’s Notes

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The Online Communities proejct helps students understand and

practice multiple online communication skills, from simple

navigation and interpersonal communication within a MOO

environment through various levels of programming (the

degree of which depends on the specific form of assignment

chosen as well as the student’s interests). Although in one

sense, MOOs seem like a very simple (almost cartoonish)

technology, that initial simplicity brings with it a relatively short

learning curve but robust long-term experiences. And if the

learning curve of the technology itself is relatively simple--a

handful of commands will be enough to get started in nearly any

MOO--the impact of that technology on communication patterns

and structures is relatively high, making MOOs a useful forum

for understanding communication as a contingent, socially

situated, and ever-changing activity.

Timeframe

Because students are being asked to join an exeternal

community, it is important to let them move slowly into that

community, observing for the most part a t the start. Only after

getting a sense of the lay of the land should they begin

participating at the level of constructing spaces. Shorter

assigments could be created by worrking with an in-house MOO

that the teacher has set up for local students, although this woul

d also create a relatively homogenous and isolated environment

(one of the benefits of the assignment is that it requires them to

go out and find other communities). Very brief (one or two hour)

assignments could be constructed by the teacher brigning in

transcripts and other documents from a MOO that will let

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students answer the questions in the assignment without

actually participating in the MOO (a valuable experience, but

time intensive).

Variations

Students could examine other forms of online community using

similar sets of questions: weblogs, instant messaging programs,

bulletin boards,etc.

Assignment Overview

MOO communities represent a popular line in the development

of online collaborative spaces that reaches back over a decade.

In a MOO (which, confusingly and recursively, stands for “MUD,

Object Oriented,” a term in which MUD stands for “Multi-User

Dimension”), users occupy virtual spaces in which they interact

with each other, move around, communicate, and more.

Although usually MOOS are text-based (so that users actually

read textual descriptions of the spaces), newer MOOs are web-

based and provide users with a more visual interactive space.

Begin by locating resources on MOOs by entering MOO into a

search engine or by visiting one of these sites:

- The MOO-Cows FAQ: http://www.moo.mud.org/moo-faq/

- The Lost Library of MOO: http://www.hayseed.net/MOO/

- LinguaMOO home page: http://lingua.utdallas.edu/

Analysis

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Read accounts of MOO users in order to gain some background

on how MOOs work. Then, locate a public MOO that you can

join. Try to pick one that’s either very general or one that

appeals to a specific interest of yours. Join the MOO and spend

at least a week getting familiar with the MOO, including its

purpose, the users in the MOO, and its history. Analyze

community in the MOO—are there communal places? Are they

inhabited? When and by whom? Who gets to build in the MOO

you occupy?

Analysis, Part 2

After you’re comfortable communicating and navigating in the

MOO you’ve chosen, build yourself a space within the MOO: an

office, a park, whatever.

1. What regulations govern building/digging in the MOO?

Who decides who else can build, and where?

2. Are there certain types of rooms that are common in

the MOO?

3. Is the architecture of the MOO based on one or more

realworld architectures? Is it a schoolhouse? An office?

A subway?

4. How would use be affected if the MOO was translated

into a different sort of architecture? Could it be an

airport? A machine shop? A hospital?

3. How is building in the MOO like writing? How is it

different than writing? Is a room a text?

4. Do other people enter your space? Are you

encouraged to enter others?

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